Better Than TV

A couple of years ago just about every guy I saw was wearing a yellow “LiveStrong” bracelet to promote awareness of testicular cancer and, I suppose, to show compassion. Those strips of embossed rubber were worn by waiters, teachers, mid-level state bureaucrats, college kids working at Ben & Jerry’s, insurance agents, under-age skate punks trying to buy beer, retired executives, boys, men, gentlemen and dudes of all description. I remember seeing one poke out from the starched cuff of my banker’s shirt sleeve. It was heartwarming – the man might have seemed automated but here was tangible proof that he either knew how to care, or he wanted everyone to know he knew he ought to care. It’s so hard to tell which when caring is expressed through a fashion trend.

Trends, by definition, have an up and a down side. The once ubiquitous yellow bands are pretty scarce these days. I noticed a website advertising them at 25% off. When fashion fades, does concern wane? Can it be that some people are such bargain hunters that they won’t pay full price for anything, including a donation to cancer research?

One of the guys I used to work with, Peter, never took his band off. I guarantee you it had nothing to do with looking cool; he was the kind of guy who didn’t give a rat’s ass what others thought of him. It’s not that he was a slob, or unkempt in any way, he just needed adult Garanimals to take the pressure off picking out clothes. Charcoal grey and brown do not go together, something even I know but he could never grasp, not at the time he worked in our office, anyway. He left town for the fashionable east coast about a year ago and, I had imagined, upgraded his wardrobe, rising beyond the Lands’ End comfort of the Midwest. I was wrong about that. Wearing a grey v-neck sweater with tan corduroys he unexpectedly stopped by the office late in the afternoon the day before Thanksgiving. Man oh man, was I glad to see him. Being the last one in an otherwise empty office the day before a holiday is more depressing than spending New Year’s Eve in a hotel room for one in Waco. Without cable. Well, that’s taking it a bit far, but you get my point. I was not only glad to see him, but grateful for the excuse to pack up and head to the Tiki Bar.

Yes, I work in a building with a Tiki Bar. We’ve also got a seafood restaurant on the first floor and a coffee shop next door, making our office ripe for a sitcom. All we’d need to do is add a little drama and some witty dialogue. And characters. We’d need more interesting, better-looking characters with perpetual sexual tension to make annoyingly bad decisions and propel the plot round and round, week after week in the same exasperating loop.

But of course, our office is nothing like tv. We don’t live in a land of existential epiphanies, preposterous pranks and perfect skin. We just show up for work day after day in our ordinary clothes and sale rack shoes. It could be argued that we could all use a make-over and a little plastic surgery, hell I know I wouldn’t turn it down (How did those worry lines become carved into my forehead? Who strapped those hams to the undersides of my arms?), but I won’t speak for the rest of the staff, even though I kind of just did. If any of you guys are reading, please know that I’m not talking about you, but the others.

As for drama, there’s not much, not that you can see, anyway; no temper tantrums, no secret trysts (unless they are really secret), no catty remarks, no explosions -- nothing to really draw attention. Ennui is quiet. Like most of white-collar America, we look forward to lunch, get pissed off when the copy machine doesn’t work, suspect our co-workers mock us behind our backs, and hoard office supplies. About the only plotlines we could scrape together would involve a bogarted stapler, a bungled copy machine toner replacement job, a misunderstanding about a happy hour venue and a controversial blog entry. Although most of the programs on tv are so vapid that even plants get bored I still don’t think we’d make the grade, not even for a mid-season pilot. Exploits in excel spreadsheets would not keep America in front of the widescreen. Unless the remote is lost.

In real life, the Tiki Bar has plastic palm trees, fake parrots (the big gaudy ones, nothing as classy as a dusky headed conure), a bamboo bar and a long list of fruity rum drinks with names like The Jimmy Buffet, Tommy’s Tsunami and Penzance Punch. What it doesn’t have is a coat rack. I once suggested to the owner that he get one and was told, “No coat racks in Tahiti. No coat racks in my bar. That’s how I keep it real.” I love that guy – no insincerity and cheap beer for the faithful. Who needs a coat rack?

Peter and I got a beer and a barstool, letting our coats slide to the floor. As he lifted his pint, I noticed he was still wearing the LiveStrong band. “So what’s with the bracelet? You haven’t taken that thing off for two years.” “Hey,” he said, with feigned indifference, “wearing is caring.” After a few seconds he cocked his head to the side and said, “brother.” We drank for a few minutes in silence. “How’s your mom?” he asked me. “She’s a tough old bird – too stubborn to let it get her.” It was a practiced line meant to show that I wasn’t afraid of the shitty cancer that attacked her body. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t fooled.

If this were tv you’d see me and Peter playing shuffle board and high fiving each other for even the smallest accomplishment. You’d hear a voice over, one of us saying something poignant about that moment of connection, about how some of us wear a bracelet, others run races and have a t-shirt to show for it and some of us just push it down deep until it becomes a hard dark kernel inside, shoved so far down it comes out of our feet as toenails. The last lines of the show would explain how joking and laughing and drinking up the night served a purpose -- how it felt good to know we’re not alone; that we’re not bad people even though we both emotionally stutter, never saying what we mean to people we love; and that although we privately rage against the cruelty of cancer we have no idea what to do with that anger.

Oh yea, and of course, Happy Holidays.

On this late morning, Thanksgiving Day, I went to take a pre-emptive, pre-gluttony walk with the dogs. A few others were out, too: staunch, winter-dressed bikers on the bike path and women walking their dogs. Lulu was wearing her coat, due to the cold, which tempered her tendency to flail and flare at dogs we passed. Despite the cloudless sky and the manageably cold weather, plus sun on the face, it took about a half an hour to dissolve a little of my cruddy mood, too boring, really, to go into. Due to this said mood, I had been mulling for a brief time on my walk the subtleties between anti-anthropomorphism and flat out misanthropy. Not feeling up to fiddly mind benders, I pitched it out of my head. Good riddance. Occasionally in the breeze I smelled a ham cooking. TK continued her unending quest for crumbs in the snowy grass. When we got back home, the Hmong family next door had 14 cars parked in front of their house.

Bug, enthusiastically, as ever, is eating his parrot pellets, dipping them in his water bowl. He is, of course, oblivious to the pending nation-wide engorgement festival. He's doing what he loves to do--go in his paper bag and shred some magazines, shake the spare keys in the box in the bag. Lulu's treed a squirrel and is volleying barks at the tree in her terrrier-intense manner. TK thinks maybe it will come down if she just stares at it long enough. Now Lulu's walking on her hindlegs in front of the tree like a circus dog.

I am going to our friends' for the feast of the day, and I plan, as always to fill up on bread. He texted me this morning, Bring your liver and pancreas. This seems reasonable and wise. Wouldn't leave home without them.

On this holiday of thanks, I am grateful for my liver and pancreas, and I hope you are, too. In drastic measures, one can receive a pancreatic transplant, I recently learned. I had previously thought if one ever even thought of touching the organ during surgery the thing just fell apart, promptly eating everything around it with its pre-packaged super enzymes. Apparently, I am wrong. I don't know how it's done, but maybe it's form of magic.



I love my liver, by the way, tremendously, too. God bless the liver and the hundreds of things it does unselfishly every day.

And I wanted to send out a mushy hello to everyone out there. Miss you, love you. And try to take it a little easy on the organs, ok?

Improving With Age

Having spent my childhood in Texas I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty: ice cream melts if you don’t eat it right away. To me, the phrase ‘delayed gratification’ is a euphemism for wasted opportunities, dull predictability and soggy sugar cones. I’m in good company here in my house where having to wait for anything results in either full-on hysteria or barely contained panic. Seed balls, salmon tid-bits, the bed by the heat vent, Gail Ambrosius’ chocolate truffles, an overpriced bottle of Willamette Valley Pinot -- all examples of desires requiring immediate dispatch.

Pets and children too young to control their own bowel movements are exempt from even trying to enjoy later what a bit of whining or a temper tantrum could get for them right now. Not so for the rest of us. As adults, we’re expected to be ants, not grasshoppers. Sara, with her Midwestern sensibilities, seems to discipline herself without hesitation. No matter the temptation, her default answer is ‘no,’ at least initially, which could possibly, with encouragement, edge toward, ‘maybe later,’ whereas mine is consistently ‘hell yea,’ making me a lot like the Bug, except he’s much more entertaining when he says ‘yes’ (his only really solid party trick). He draws out the word so far it snaps and separates into two syllables – a break made all the more clear by his slow head bob right in the middle of it. “Yyee-esss.” “Yyee (head bob down)-(head bob up)esss.” “Yyee-esss.” He’ll repeat it as many times as I do. Who wouldn’t like such an agreeable feathered fellow?

About five years ago, long before my little green yes man showed up, I was wasting my days working in a dusty, sunless warehouse moving pallets of wine from one tall shelf to another with a forklift. It was sort of like playing Tetris over and over again with a modified bumper car from a carnival.

I knew I shouldn't have taken the job, but it was a desperate measure designed to get me out of a crappy job, as had been taking the crappy job I was leaving. No doubt about it, every step I took was going down.

The first moment I walked into the airplane hangar sized, climate-controlled building, the voice in my head exploded with an Edvard Munch type psychic scream so loud, so clear, that the echo of it lurked around the boxes of champagne and chardonnay for months. I should have taken my own advice and run fast, screaming like the guy on the bridge, snagging a bottle of Veuve Cliquot on my way out. But four weeks of vacation and a deep discount on really good wine was enough to sell out my own brain. I am so fucking cheap.

At first I contented myself with the notion that it’s not what you do, it’s who you do it with; a mental trick that worked well enough to get me out of bed and into my steel-toed boots every day for about six weeks, which is how long it took me to realize that the guys I worked with were total dickheads and I was pretty sure they had a corresponding term for me.

Bob, the boss, when in a good mood, had a habit of driving the forklift as fast as it would go, weaving through the aisles and at the top of his lungs quacking duck-like: “Fuuuck….fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, fuck fuck!” and then laughing like he was auditioning for the part of mad scientist. Initially, I thought he was a speed freak, but I later discovered he was just drunk.

When he was in a bad mood he’d mutter to himself while rearranging wine we’d just rearranged and take really long lunches. He was drunk then too. Either way, he ignored me, having decided that I was a stuck up bitch. And maybe I was.

The other guys had their quirks too. Jim, a 35 year old 6’7” redhead spoke with the speed of an amphetamine addict, his verbal firehose on full blast, without pause or breath, revealing a stream of conscious dialogue mundane in meaning and fascinating in delivery. As we’d hoist boxes of cheap plonk up onto a shelf above my head (eye-level for him), he’d launch into one of his monologues, often about food. “I stopped at Pick ‘N’ Save you know Pick ‘N’ Flick yesterday because I wanted peanut butter I really love peanut butter don’t you love peanut butter (not really a question – no pause) but I only had $3 so I couldn’t get any bread only the peanut butter so I got the peanut butter but not the bread.” The words would just tumble out, one on top of another, too rapid to easily understand and too trivial to make the effort. Instead of listening to him I often found myself fixated on counting the seconds between breaths (one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…..).

Then there was Ted, a fellow history major who also considered the warehouse job to be only temporary – a minor stop on the way to a bigger and better occupation. He had been there for five years. I thought we’d identify with one another, but instead our common circumstance proved repulsive, like looking in a mirror and seeing ‘loser' written across your forehead. So instead of commraderie we built our own private Maginot Lines; mine of morose silence and snobbery; his of crude male humor and silly flamboyance. He wore Hawaiian shirts and shorts all year long, which is completely nuts because we live in Wisconsin, a place where global warming is welcome. When I asked him about the shorts in February, he grinned and told me, “I like to let the boys air out.”

For some stupid reason I think I have to keep a job for at least a year, no matter how shitty, but before a year was up, doing doughnuts in a forklift on the smooth cement had lost all its appeal and I was taking advantage of my wine discount to an unhealthy extreme.

After scouting around for another job it was clear that my jumbled work history still had me on a speedy escalator to nowhere so I did what every middle-class person crushed of creativity would do: I went back to school to study accounting. It wasn’t entirely unpremeditated. I’d made a deal with myself while in my mid 30’s that if I hit 40 and still had no real career I’d force myself to do the dullest thing I could think of, which was, of course, bean counting. With a threat like that hanging over one’s head, who wouldn’t get their shit together? Answer: me.

I resisted. It meant giving up evenings and weekends for two years and then even more time to complete a series of exams. Could I force myself to do that? A friend pushed me over the edge by summing it up like this: “Yea, work now, get what you want later --think of it like a frequent flyer program. So you have to go to Scranton a bunch of times for business but when you rack up enough points you get to go to Tahiti.” Tahiti, I thought: snorkeling, warm sand and those fruity drinks with umbrellas. I liked the Idea of Tahiti. And, I had made a promise to myself. No matter that the decision was made after a birthday pub crawl. I stand by my word, no matter how slurred.

School sucked. I hated almost every second of class, of homework and especially of fucking group projects. I spent hours and hours dinking around with the debits and credits of theoretical widget factories. Despite my distaste, I kicked ass as a student, unlike my pathetic performance almost 20 years before. Back in 1987 I was a lazy, smart-ass kid who hung on to just enough gpa to graduate. In fact, The University of Texas probably let me slide a little just to get rid of me and my Flock of Seagulls haircut. I felt like I was making up for it this time and most importantly I was determined to see it through to the end even though it was nearly as soul sucking as one of Harry Potter’s dementors. I had made myself a shit sandwich and I was damn well going to eat it. With onions and bleu cheese.

Since the prospect of a job in accounting wasn't exciting to me, yet I'm so amazingly stubborn that I wouldn't change my course, I needed to do something to inject some gratification in my delayed gratification plan. I had to have something, some dangling carrot, so I bought myself a really, really good bottle of wine to stash away. I got it at an auction and gave more for it than I paid for the first car I bought. On-line wine sellers had it valued at double that price which made me giddy with anticipation. That’s how I remember it anyway. Sara has a different version of the story in which I was a little tipsy on free beer (she might actually go further than that), opened the bidding on a bottle I didn’t know much about and although it quickly jumped out of our price range, just kept going, eventually topping the last bid with a ridiculous offer. And here’s her favorite part of the story: she ended up paying for it. Truth is so subjective.

I squirreled my prize away in the cellar (basement, whatever), and for the next four years fantasized about the day I would finally deserve to open it – when I’d finished all my classes and passed all four grueling exams. I pictured me and Sara, (me 20 pounds thinner, Sara in a beautiful velvety dress) the wine surreally red in the decanter, both of us relaxed and jovial, sitting close on the couch, faithful Taiko at my feet, Sweet William chattering away, and finally, finally, raising the glass and reveling in the subtle magnificence of the alchemy of superb wine. Of note, an accounting job does not figure into this daydream.

It took me three tries to pass the last exam. Each time the pain and stress of studying was like giving a kidney, which left me one kidney in the hole. When I finally passed, I wept out of relief, and then went right back to work. I was completely buried in spreadsheets and other accounting goop. The ’97 Cab stayed in the basement. Er, uh, cellar.

On November 4, 2008, the time had come. Oddly enough, I was about 20 pounds lighter. The weight loss (due to stress) came mostly off my ass which didn’t really need to shrink, leaving the life preserver around my middle intact. Also, I’d just had the worst haircut of my life. I had been shorn so brutally that you could see my scalp in places. But Sara looked lovely. We ordered a pizza and camped out in front of the tv, caught in the collective excitement of the election. The decanter glimmered, all promise and possibility. The first taste told me that I’d jumped the gun. A wine of such stature needed more time to breathe. As the evening progressed Barack Obama’s success became more and more certain as he racked up the electoral votes. The wine’s ranking never improved. It just kept sucking.

As President Elect Obama gave his speech in Chicago I sat in my living room and studied the wine through the glass, brick red in the center and almost clear around the edge. I had waited so long for it, and it would never improve. If this had all been about delayed gratification, I would have cried, but all I could do was laugh. I laughed from deep down, kidney deep. I had the extreme privilege of being a part of one of the most significant moments in American history and on top of that I’d done what I said I’d do, requiring every strand of discipline I could scrounge. Not a bad evening at all. Before going to bed I got on-line and after a quick search discovered that the wine’s value had plummeted to $30 a bottle. Had I been reading up on this all along, I would have seen that this particular wine peaked 2 years before, and should have been drunk then. Had I not confused success with sacrifice I would have known that.

As I poured this very expensive bottle of unpalatable wine down the kitchen sink I realized that it was not wasted. I’ve learned a hell of a lot in the past four years, most importantly that everything – and I mean everything – is a metaphor.

Stress Management

After living in our house for 6 years we’ve finally put up curtains to replace the beige (originally white), mangled, dusty mini-blinds that made our place look like a cheap rental with an unresponsive absentee landlord. We’re on a tight time budget so we bought tension curtain rods – the sort that require no installation save squishing the rod ends toward one another, sticking the apparatus in the window, letting go and allowing the spring to hold it up. But with the weight of the curtains will it stay up? In our house, you bet. The whole damn place is held together by tension.

The humans of the house have both been a little on edge for the past, oh, four years or so. Well, six years, really, to be fair. Or eight, maybe eight years. Anything before that I’ve deliberately blocked out.

I am capable of controlling my anxiety, especially with a glass of cabernet in one hand and a tube of Xanax-laced cookie dough in the other, but besides those moments of calm, let’s just say I wouldn’t be the world’s greatest air traffic controller. Unless that's how air traffic controllers "get in the zone." As a frequent flyer I really hope that's not the case.

At home I have an excuse for my, shall we call it, excitability. Picture this: Gracie the uptight terrier squealing and frantically pawing at the back door like she’s going to dig right through the glass; the phone ringing, its location unknown (between the cushions of the couch? in a coat pocket? who the fuck knows?); the old cat circling my legs figuring if she trips me I’ll feed her breakfast which consists of gourmet kitty pâté that is not good enough on its own, so it has to be diluted with hot water, blended with a second type of chunkier food, served by the heater vent and guarded from the riff-raff; Sweet William sitting in his room acting like he can’t fly, screaming his high pitched panic CAW! CAW! CAW! that gets higher and faster and higher and faster like a warning signal that any second he’s going to blow. Oh, and I’m late for work. Work. I can’t even talk about the j.o.b. I mean it.

Like me, Gracie is uber-tense. After a few shots of espresso each morning she patrols the perimeter. She runs from one window to the next, rises up on her hind legs like a meerkat, places her sharp little front claws on the already scratched window sill, presses her snotty nose to the glass, and barks at anything in her air space, which extends to the outer limits of her sight and hearing range. The only good part of the process is that every time she hops up to look out the window she audibly farts. I don’t know why farts are funny, but they always are.

For the most part Sweet William knows how to deal with stress. Sometimes he screams like a spoiled 2 year old until he gets what he wants – usually a shoulder to sit on and a sweater to surreptitiously eat a hole out of, other times he finds an expensive textbook, rips it to shit and then takes a crap on it. Charming, I know. And, by the way, he also does that when he’s happy too, so his mood is sometimes a little hard to read. Now don’t you want to get a parrot?

The Older You Get

About two weeks ago, my 17.75 year old cat began to sporadically howl from the basement. It's the kind of drawled meow my Siamese (I got for my 5th birthday) would make at night in the middle of the hallway near the bedrooms for no apparent reason. She, being timid and neurotic, spent most of the daylight hours under my parents' bed.

My current old cat, Sasha, may be yowling when I am not home, but she seems to do it around feeding times, either before or after she's come upstairs to eat her nibble of wet food (the old ones get whatever they want). It's as if she forgets who/where she is. Or maybe it's an acute and piercing loneliness surfacing, unquenchable. The sound stabs you under your sternum.

The other new thing with her is if you go down and get her from the basement, she will sleep next to you on the couch while you watch tv. She won't even flail or cry out as you carry her up the stairs. She, who was found as a dirt-eating, weaned too early, itty street urchin on the stoop of a run-down colonial house. She never, til now, lost the feral streak. Always prickly, an occasional arm kneader/sucker.

Her mindset is so vastly changed from even a year ago. Yesterday, clueless and curious, she walked right up to Bug, and stuck her nose at his head three times, Bug with his beak ready to chomp her tender pink nose. The point is, Sasha now loves everyone.

Bug, on the other hand, is a bit more selective. He prefers his two humans, and the companionship of our birdsitter. Occasionally, he will swoop down on the shoulder of a brown-haired female friend, who tend to shreik a little and shrug him off in a panic. Bug never seems to be offended by it, though.

Besides biting his two humans, SSW has bitten those who stick their hands near his cage or near him while he's perching on one of his humans: my brother, my friend John, the bird sitter (who was nonplussed). He has yet to land on any other person with blond hair besides me. Maybe we just have brown-haired friends?

It's late fall and this means fleece-typed sweaters are out of the cedar chest. Bug's now thinking of destroying the zipper pull as I type this. I am listening to Rose Polenzani's new cd, http://www.rosepolenzani.com/, off her website. The bird likes the harmonica and percussion, quietly matching his chirp to the beat, but randomly.

It's almost dinner time, and after that, movie time, the cat next to me on the couch. She's melting away as she ages, muscles disappearing, arthritis rising. She will purr and purr on the couch, and I look at her, seeing a different cat than the one I have had over these last 17 years. What ever disrepair aging has brought her, she is content to be the new her. Stranger, sweeter, loving--

A Typical Sunday

Sweet William loves to watch football. Perhaps I anthropomorphize? What’s wrong with that? I’m not totally delusional -deep down I know what attracts him: a stable shoulder, complete attention (during commercials), a beer label to peel , the occasional snib of a potato chip, the frequent burst of expletives and the loud clatter of absurd beer ads. He doesn’t care that Budweiser’s claim of ‘drinkability’ is empty marketing and if all you can say about your brew is that it’s the coldest then you’ve just given away the fact that your beer tastes like spring water mixed with a little piss - almost tasteless with a twinge of nasty. It’s clear that I am a beer snob and my bird is not. He delights in the claim (made loudly enough) that Miller Lite (sic) has great taste and is less filling. (Less filling? That’s great if the goal is to create greater urine output and hence, eventually, more beer at the Miller brewery). T o my dismay, I believe that Sweet William would happily tear the label off of any beer. Now you see what I have to live with.

But this isn’t really about beer, or football (shit! the Packers just lost to the Vikings), or even politics - the other popular American blood sport, although given the events of the last week, it’s tempting to add a word about the election. Ok, I’ve caved – one word -- well, more than a word. See, I’m untrustworthy. Fits the topic, ya know? But, hopefully the B-man is different. Hail to the chief! (elect). And thanks to the millions of Americans who voted, no matter who they cast their ballot for. Although it is a mystery to me how any fuckwit could have voted for John McCain and his intellectually challenged running mate. Think about it, if Hillary Clinton had performed half as poorly in interviews as Palin did, Clinton would have been dipped in shit, rolled in boogers and drug behind a truck. But that’s all over now, until next week when the 2012 candidates are announced.

Again - enough of beer, football and politics. This whole dealybob blog thing is supposed to be about the bird. Or cheese. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which. Today I’m going to pick the bird; the tiny, free-range green monster whose vulnerability trumps everyone else’s need for attention. He sits up here on my shoulder, the only one allowed on the couch, soaks up all the attention in the room and projects an attitude of superiority the way a lord looks down on his serfs. What more is there to say?

TK Wants the Bug Dead

I have become lax. And with laxity, in this case, comes near death for a fierce, but tiny friend.

Equation: dog on couch + Sara on couch + bird flying over dog (possessive of couch) to Sara = a flash of teeth, an open maw, a blur of green, a snapping sound, the bird somehow on my shoulder, despite.

He sat on my shoulder wide-eyed and silent, breathing hard. He knew what almost happened. My own heart was pounding.

No more dogs on the couch, sorry pups. It just makes you growly and weird anyhow.

This is why birds do not live to be 35, 50, 70 years old.



I am a terrible mama sometimes.

But how can we not love each in their instrinsic natures, their sheer cores of wildness?

Jonesy's Back in Town

And all the creatures of the household are celebratory. The parrot's screaming and bobbing and shredding, joyous, skull-piercing-loud, but ecstatic.

The flock is back in action.

Falling - Are You a Bird or a Cat?

Birds, cats and people have something in common: embarrassment. When faced with failure - large or small - birds and cats react differently, but they are definitely embarrassed.

Cats, normally acrobatic, fall and pretend the mishap never occurred. Francis, or F-Cat, provides the perfect example. He’s 15 years old which is approximately 95 in human years. ( 5 people years equals 1 cat year – a number I just made up - selected mostly because it’s close to 7, which, without any scientific proof is a number people readily accept for dogs, and 5 times 15 is easy to multiply in my head). The point here is that he’s not the svelte feline he used to be. Yet, he never gives up trying. He just can’t get it through his head that it’s a real bitch to leap to the top of the fridge. His reluctance to accept the armchair and crossword puzzle of old age is probably due to his rapid physical decline – one day he’s scaling the 6 foot fence and the next he’s shopping for a segway. We attribute this sudden change to the death of our other cat, Zoot. Zoot was a portly and prissy fellow; picture the bastard child of Pee Wee Herman and Dom DeLuise as a cat in a tuxedo and you’ll have a pretty good picture of him. Just following Zootie’s death, F-Cat doubled his weight. The current theory is that he ate Zoot, or at least absorbed his spirit and with it his fat content.

F-Cat is now a rotund 17 pounds, a poster cat for the excesses of our western lifestyle. But, he can still lick himself in all the places necessary for good feline hygiene, which I am enormously thankful for as the last thing I want to do is to clean my cat’s anus with a baby wipe. All this extra pudge has meant that he often uses his claws to haul his ass up, a practice unpopular in our household, especially when the destination is the back rest of our new leather couch or the bed, via a handmade quilt.

He’ll leap, slip, grab, slide and plop on the ground. If you happen to notice his little blunder, F-Cat makes it clear that he meant to do that. He doesn’t have to regain his composure, because he never lost it. Without missing a beat he begins grooming, often by rolling back on his rear, sticking his back leg straight up in the air in a yoga pose and cleaning himself from belly on down to the place mentioned in the previous paragraph. I hope the latter part of the exercise is not a yoga pose, but I’d never know. I tried yoga once and fell asleep while attempting some sort of ‘relaxing’ exercise. I never went back because I was pissed off that I paid $15 for a nap on a crappy mat. And, yes, I was embarrassed.

Sweet William reacts differently to his mistakes. A poor landing or a slip while climbing makes him furious. And when something pisses him off, you know it – he makes sure everybody knows it. He screams, paces, and flaps his wings up in his scariest ‘fuck off, I’ll cut you, man’ routine. I find it tempting to laugh at the 100 grams of feathered fury, but one look at the scar on my finger reminds me of his ability to follow through on his threats. He demands to be taken seriously. Deeper than my fear that he’ll lash out is my empathy. You see, I understand his outrage.

People can go either way. I know it’s more complicated than that, but on a basic level, it isn’t. I can imagine the question on a dating website – “When you make a mistake, are you more like a cat or a bird?” The answer is revealing. Kind of like, “If you could have one super power, what would it be?” (Of course that’s a weed out question - anyone who says anything besides omnipotence is just plain stupid.)

Failure. A bird or a cat. It’s the ninth inning, two outs, score tied, bases loaded, and you’re the last batter. A powerful swoosh at nothing but air - that’s strike three and the season’s over. Do you slam the tip of your bat into home plate and grit your teeth? Do you push your shame down deep, nonchalantly shrug your shoulders and tell your teammates that your plan worked and now you can all go get a beer?

Now for the tough stuff. The real complications come when our mishaps have nothing to do with physical errors, something Francis and Sweet William know nothing of. Neither of them has ever made a mistake on their taxes, failed an important test, made thoughtless career moves or blathered drunkenly to their boss at an office party pretending to enjoy golf. Lucky little bastards.

As we know, or some of us do, there are degrees of error. The mistake on taxes can be corrected with a 1040X – a do-over provided by the IRS since they know that there are plenty of tax paying morons. Some tests can be taken twice, thrice or more if success is all that important, and if one is very lucky, the boss at the office party was so hammered he thinks you really do like golf and the Christmas tie with the twinkling light really is cool. But take it up a notch. Some mistakes are not fixable.

A hard fall. A broken nose. Can one recover? Will the nose always be crooked? Poor judgment can domino, knock over others, even people you care for so deeply you’d take a bullet for them. (Well, you’d jump in the line of fire if you were pretty sure it would hit an extremity, not your torso or head – your ass perhaps - you’re just not that selfless.)

These situations generate big questions. How to cope with the loss of friendships, pride, the respect of your peers? In one part of your brain there is an excuse factory which churns out bullshit to console yourself and perhaps look for anyone or anything to blame. But the factory has to shut down. Excuses muddle responsibility. And as an FYI, so does vodka and red bull, although there is a moment that the muddling of just about everything can be quite therapeutic, when used responsibly.

Responsibility. Francis and Sweet William remain blissfully ignorant of this burden even when leather is ripped and skin is broken. And there’s the big difference. Taking responsibility is the only way to resolve the shame, sadness and fury that wraps around you on your downward spiral, much like the way cotton candy whirls around and sticks to a white cardboard cone. It’s sticky and tough to get off, but in the end you just have to eat it, digest it, and well, deal with it. In the words of a good friend of mine “You’re a total wastrel of a dipshit if you don’t buck the fuck up and deal.”

Falling is not the greatest shame. It’s not getting back up. I’d rather be known as a person who sometimes trips but always gets up from the fall, than a person who always succeeds. There’s a Japanese proverb, ‘fall down seven times, get back up eight.’ Eight just became my lucky number.